According to the introduction, this is a book of poems about birds in Chile; Neruda was a Chilean writer and diplomat. The collection contains three long poems: one about migration at the beginning of the book, one about flight approximately half way through the collection, and a poem titled: "The Poet Says Good-bye to Birds" at the end. The majority of the poems are approximately one page long about specific species of birds. Since I am not very familiar with many of them, I found the pictures on the web were much more satisfactory than the relatively few black and white illustrations in the book. There was one section of the book titled "Rarae Aves," which includes riddles about birds written as poems; at first I thought that these poem were about extinct birds since I did not find them on the web.

Although the poems in the collection are interesting, to really appreciate many of them to their fullest, I would have needed to know both more about many of the birds and more about the geography of Chile.

Includes very interesting introduction to Neruda and this particular work in the translator’s introduction. ( )